LinuxCon North America/CloudOpen North America

I/O performance has often been the main barrier preventing many enterprise workloads, such as database servers and OLTP systems, from moving to a virtualized environment or cloud. This presentation will first summarize the fruits of recent efforts to improve the storage performance of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, including the new “data-plane” technology for block I/O. These have allowed us to achieve the highest storage I/O rates ever reported for a single virtual machine (1.6 million IOPS). We will also discuss how to fully exploit this “data-plane” and other new features in KVM to optimize storage performance in virtualized environments or clouds.

This presentation should be of interest to developers and operators deploying, or planning to deploy, enterprise workloads in KVM-based virtualized environments or clouds. Familiarity with virtualization is assumed.